CHE424

Chemical Reaction Engineering II

Notes 5: Convection Model

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 Convection Model for Laminar Flow

• When the tube or pipe is long enough and the

fluid is not very viscous, the dispersion or tank-
in-series model can be used to represent the
flow in these vessels.
• For viscous fluids, you have laminar flow with
its characteristic parabolic velocity profile.
• Because of the high viscosity, there is a slight
radial diffusion between faster and slower fluid
elements.
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• In the extreme we have pure convection model;
this assumes that each element of fluid slides
past its neighbour with no interaction by
molecular diffusion. Thus the spread in residence
time is caused only by velocity variations (Figure
1).

Figure 1: Flow of fluids according to the convection model

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 Convection model and its RTD
• How to tell from theory which model to use
• The first question to ask is, "Which model should be used in a
given situation?"
• The chart, adapted from Ananthakrishnan (1965) tells what
regime you are in and which model to use. Figure 2.
• Just locate the point which corresponds to the fluid being
used (Schmidt number), the flow conditions (Reynolds
number), and vessel geometry (L/dt). Your system should not
be in turbulent flow. This chart only works for laminar flows.
In this chart, is the reciprocal of the Bodenstein number.
It measures the flow contribution made by molecular
diffusion. It is NOT the axial dispersion number, D/udt, except
in the pure diffusion regime.

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• The pure diffusion regime is not a very interesting
regime because it represents very slow flow.
• Gases are likely to be in the dispersion regime, not
the pure convection regime. Liquids can be in one
regime or another. Very viscous liquids like polymers
are likely to be in the pure convection regime. If your
system falls in no-man’s- land, calculate the reactor
behaviour based on the two bounding regimes and
try to average it. Numerical solution is impractical
here. It is very important to use the correct model
since the RTD curves are different for different
regimes (see figure 3).

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Figure 2: Map showing which flow models to use in any situation
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Figure 3: Comparison of the RTD of the three models

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 How to tell from experiment which model to
use
• The sharpest way of experimentally distinguishing
between models comes by noting how a pulse or
sloppy input pulse of tracer spreads as it moves
downstream in a flow channel. For example, consider
the flow, as shown in Figure 4, The dispersion or
tanks-in-series models are both stochastic models;
thus, we see that the variance grows linearly with
distance or; (1)

• The convective model is a deterministic model;

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• The spread of tracer grows linearly with distance;
(2)

• Whenever you have measurements of  at 3

points use this test to tell which model to use.
Just see if (in the figure 4).
(4)

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• The following figure 5 shows how you
introduce and measure tracers in this system.

Figure 4: The changing spread of a tracer curve tells which model is the right one to
use.
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Figure 5: Various ways of introducing and measuring tracers.

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 Pulse response Expt. and the E curve for Laminar
Flow in pipes.
• The shape of the response curve is strongly
influenced by the way tracer is introduced into the
flowing fluid and how it is measured.
• You may inject or measure the tracer in two main
ways, as shown in Fig. 5. We therefore have four
combinations of boundary conditions each with its
own particular E curve (Figure 6). These E curves are
shown in Fig. 7. As may be seen in Fig.7, the E, E*,
and E** curves are quite different, one from the
other.

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• E is the proper response curve for reactor
purposes; it is the curve treated in Note 1, it
represents the RDT in the vessel.
• E* and *E are identical always, so we will call
them E* from now on. One

Figure 6: Various combinations of input-output methods

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• One correction for the planar boundary condition
will transform this curve to the proper RTD.
• E** requires two corrections-one for entrance,
one for exit-to transform it to a proper RTD.
• It may be simpler to determine E* or E** rather than
E. However, remember to transform these measured
tracer curves to the E curve before calling it the RTD.
Let us see how to make this transformation

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Figure 7: The different output curves of E’s depending on how the tracer is introduced and measured

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• For pipes and tubes with their parabolic velocity
profiles the various pulse response curves are
found to be as follows:

(4)

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• Where;
• Two different ways of measuring the output
curves are displayed in Figure 8. Note the
simple relationship between

Figure 8: Two different ways of measuring the output curves

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• Thus we can write; (5)

• Step Response Experiment and the F curve

• When we do the step experiment by switching from
one fluid to the other, we obtain the Cstep curve from
which we should be able to find the F curve.
However, this input always represents the flux input,
while the output can be either planar or flux. Thus
we only have two combinations, as shown in Fig. 8
With these two combinations of boundary conditions
their equations and graphs are given in Eq. 6 and Fig.
9 for graphs.
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 (6)

Figure 9: Different ways of measuring the output

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• Also each F curve is related to its corresponding E
curve. Thus at any time t1 or 1;
(7)

• The relationship is similar between E and F.

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 Chemical Conversion in Laminar flow Reactors

• Single nth order Reactions

• In the pure convection regime (negligible molecular
diffusion) each element of fluid follows its own
streamline with no intermixing with neighbouring
elements.
• In essence this gives macro-fluid behaviour. The
conversion expression is therefore;

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 (8)

For Zero order reaction of a Newtonian in

Laminar flow in a pipe, integration of eq. 8
gives;
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 (9)

• For first-order reaction of a Newtonian in laminar

flow in a pipe;
(10)

• Where ei(y) is the exponential integral.

• For second-order reaction of a Newtonian in
laminar flow in a pipe;
(11)

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• Notes:
1)- Test for RTD curves. Proper RTD curves must
satisfy the material balance checks (calculated
zero and first moments should agree with the
measured values.
(12)

• The E curves of this topic (Note 5), for non-

Newtonians and all shapes of channels, all meet this
requirement. All the E* and E** curves of this topic
do not; however, their transforms to E do.

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2)- The variance of all the E curves of this topic is
finite but infinite for all E* and E** curves. Be
sure to know which curve you are dealing with.
• In general the convection model E curve has a long
tail. This makes the measurement of its variance
unreliable. Thus 2 is not a useful parameter for
convection models and is not presented here.
• The breakthrough time 0 is probably the most
reliably measured and most useful descriptive
parameter for convection models, so it is widely
used.

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3)- Comparison with plug flow for nth-order
reaction is shown in Fig. 10.
• This graph shows that even at high XA
convective flow does not drastically lower
reactor performance. This result differs from
the dispersion and tanks-in-series models. This
result differs from dispersion and tank-in-
series models seen earlier.

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• Multiple Reactions in Laminar flow
• For a two-step first-order irreversible reaction like

• Because laminar flow represents a deviation from

plug flow, the amount of intermediate formed
will be somewhat less than for plug flow (figure
11).

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Figure 10: Convective flow lowers conversion compared to plug flow

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Figure 11:Typical product distribution curves for laminar flow compared
with plug flow and mixed flow

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• The disappearance of A is given by the eqn. (10)
and the formation and disappearance of R is
given by a more complicated eqn. not shown
here. The previous graph fig.11 is a result of the
solutions to the equations. It shows that LFR gives
a little less intermediate than does the PFR, about
20% of the way from PFR to MFR (CSTR). This can
be generalised to more complex reaction
systems.

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